SaaS Panel aka Salesforce.com at AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford Tech Startup Entrepreneurship 2008

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AlwaysOn panel Location Based Services: Who will make the most money?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

AlwaysOn Location Based Services panel Summit at Stanford Tech Startup Entrepreneurship

This panel, moderated by Rajeev Chang, Managing Director at Rutberg & Co, National Chair, Technology, Sonnenschein, examined the prospects for Tech M&A and IPO over the next two years.

The panelists were:

    Sumit Agarwal, Senior Product Manager, Mobile, Google
    Mark Collins, VP Consumer Data, AT&T Wireless
    Cormac Conroy, VP of Engineering, QCT Modem Technology, QUALCOMM
    Bob Iannucci, CTO, Nokia
    Peter-Frans Pauwels, CTO, TomTom

Moderator (Chang): What is the biggest location based service?

Panel (consensus): Navigation systems, traffic, applications on top of it including social networking.

Moderator: How big will social networking based location based services be?

Iannucci (Nokia): Huge, we have great applications in our lab.

Moderator: Are the carriers going to be an obstacle here? Who owns the location information?

Agarwal (Google): Our view is that the users own the location information, and it should be open.

Conroy (QualComm): Agree; and privacy will be traded off for convenience. At the end of the day, open is the leverage point.

Iannucci (Nokia): would like to see location information opened up; but it is a controversial issue. Wi-Fi access points are a great source of location information; unlike GPS it works better indoors. Can we expose that in some way so we can do in-mall or on-location navigation?

Moderator: What location information is available to the carriers?

Nokia: the S60 has a built-in API which provides GPS information; but it's up to the carriers.

Agarwal: The horse is leaving the barn because the demand for, and utility of this information is so great. Map tiles, geo information, are all going open - that's the reality.

Pauwels: Our PND (personal navigation device) system is closed (proprietary) because we are streaming very high definition information over that connection. But local search, field prices those sorts of things may benefit from open-ness. We are delivering a single continuous user experience; i don't see it opening up anytime soon like the iPhone is.

Moderator: what about devices like the eye-Fi which is a camera in an SD form factor, that geo-tags photos.

Qualcomm: the location has to always be available, Wi-Fi is not a reliable source of geo-tagging information.

Moderator: the MyLocation Google platform does some level of coarser geo-tagging, using the cell ID (physical location of the towers)... the carrier-assisted geotagging gives a higher degree of resolution.

Discussion of importance of owning the mapping information (two companies).

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An interesting discussion, good job by the moderator keeping it moving.